The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 83: ‘The Media v. O.J. Simpson’ With Bryan Curtis

Episode Date: March 30, 2016

Ringer editor-at-large Bryan Curtis hosts a feature podcast examining the media element of the Trial of the Century. Guests include HBO’s Jim Lampley, former New York Times TV writer Bill Carter, and ‘Inside Edition’ correspondent Jim Moret, who covered the trial for CNN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get 20% off your first order when you go to MeUndies.com. That's MeUndies.com for 20% off your first order. MeUndies.com. Hey, guys. Welcome to the Bill Simmons Podcast. This is Brian Curtis, editor-at-large of The Ringer, filling to the Bill Simmons Podcast. This is Brian Curtis, editor-at-large of The Ringer, filling in for Bill today. This is our first ever media podcast, so we thought we'd try something a little wild and wacky, a little different than what you're used to hearing over here. But I hope you guys enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

If you're old enough to remember 1994, the last couple of months have probably felt strangely familiar. Everybody's talking about O.J. Simpson again. Of course, there's the FX miniseries American Crime Story, The People vs. O.J. Simpson, and in March, the website TMZ reported that a knife, perhaps the long-lost murder weapon, had been found buried in the yard of O.J.'s old house in L.A. We've even gotten weirdo O.J. media footnotes, like Bennett Omalu, the Dr. Will Smith plays in the movie Concussion, who came forward to claim that Simpson was suffering from CTE. This is all very fitting, because while some people think of O.J.'s saga as one that flows through courtrooms,

I like to think of it as one that flowed through the media, especially the media institutions of the 90s, multiplexes and supermarket tabloids and 24-hour cable news. Let's follow O.J.'s broken field run through the media and see just how the press shaped the way we think about him. This episode is called The Media vs. O.J. Simpson. You would have to have been alive in 1975 or 76 to understand how big O.J. was. And I don't think that there was an American athlete at that time who was more visible, more popular, more celebrated than O.J. Simpson. He was number one. That's Jim Lampley, who was O.J. Simpson's sportscaster colleague at ABC and NBC during the 80s and 90s. I was a kid from North Carolina who had not met a whole lot of famous people before I got involved in sports broadcasting. And the notion that I was friends with OJ Simpson,

it was kind of mind-blowing. And, you know, I wanted to feel that vibe every time I could. When I was out on the Monday Night Football circuit in 1984 doing the halftimes after I inherited the halftime highlights from Howard Cosell, the worst job anybody could possibly have in broadcasting. The game would end. We'd go back to the hotel and then and Juicy and I would go out. There was always a limousine available and there was always somewhere to go. And we knew all the, you know, hot spots in every NFL town. And we'd go into bars and restaurants. And I knew we'd always get the best table and we were always going to get free drinks, et cetera, et cetera, because I was with OJ. And, you know, the fact that other people

called him OJ, but I called him Juicy because I was closer, you know, was a tremendous ego trip. It was all, you know, it was all something that fed my ego probably in the wrong way, but it was, it was irresistible. The first image of OJ that appeared in the media was a nice one, almost ridiculously nice. Before the murders, OJ was America's best pal. In 1975, when OJ was still in the middle of his 11-year NFL career, he started doing commercials for Hertz Rent-A-Car. He was the living symbol of Hertz's speedy and friendly customer service. OJ would run through the airport as little girls and an old lady cheered, go OJ, go! OJ kept doing Hertz ads even after he pled no contest to spousal battery charges in 1989. The press had buried that story, and as a Hertz executive later told

the Washington Post, if reporters didn't think the charges should interfere with OJ's nice guy image, why should Hertz? The idea of OJ as America's best pal got another push from the work he did as a sportscaster, first on ABC, where he was briefly in the booth on Monday Night Football, and later on NBC, where he worked the studio show in the sidelines. You see, OJ wasn't a good sportscaster. No one would confuse his sideline work with Andrea Kramerers. But that's not really what he was there for. O.J. was in the booth or studio to be famous, to be O.J. to lead to commercial, then at some point he was going to break out of what he was saying and he was going to say 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, because he'd be getting a count in his ear and he would repeat it to the camera, which is always a mark of somebody who, hey, they don't know exactly what they're doing. But of course, with O.J., it was charming. The other half of

O.J.'s nice guy image before the murders was crafted by movies. At first, O.J. had visions of being a movie star. No less than Lee Strasberg of the Actor's Studio called him a natural. In the 80s, O.J. publicly declared he wanted to win an Oscar, or, you know, at least an Emmy. But after a few years of walk-on parts in TV movies and the strange HBO scripted series First in Ten, that idea had fizzled. O.J. was getting movie parts for the same reason he was on the sidelines.

He was O.J., a guy who carried around this odd halo of fame. The director David Zucker cast him in the 1988 spoof The Naked Gun. He was really known for the Hertz commercials where he would run through airports. And of course his legacy know, his, his legacy, you know, as an athlete was amazing. And, you know, he became a spokesperson for product and a movie star because he was in, you know, he would be in movies because he was a celebrity athlete, you know, in the grand tradition of, you know, all those celebrity athletes, you know, that have been in movies, you know, for decades. And O.J. was not that great in his movies. But when he came to The Naked Gun, you know, he was pretty good, but he got better as the series went on.

In The Naked Gun, O.J. played Detective Nordberg, the pal of Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin. If you've seen The Naked Gun as many times as I have, you'll remember the part wasn't quite as challenging as Ray Allen's in He Got Game. O.J. spent most of the Naked Gun in a coma before reappearing in the final act in a wheelchair where he was thrown off the upper deck of Dodger Stadium. But the Naked Gun, when you adjust the box office grosses for inflation, made nearly $170 million. And that, OJ, stuck in our brains.

He was the guy that, he was really Wile E. Coyote, just the, you know, the guy that would, the schlamazel who, you know, stuff fell on him. You can see the image, right? In today's terms, O.J. would be like a combo of Michael Strahan and The Rock. He was famous for his athletic prowess and his charisma, but mostly, as Jim Lampley tells it, for being himself, for being our friend. He was everybody's best friend. On a man-to-man friendship level, you would have to search the world over, I think, to find somebody who had O.J.'s level of fame and eminence and who was as gracious, as warm, as polite, and as loyal a friend, man to man, as he could be.

And I'll give you a perfect example. If O.J. had investments, and he had many, if he had an involvement in some kind of a retail company, and you were one of his buddies, then you would get birthday presents, Christmas presents, et cetera, et cetera, that reflected his involvements. And when I came back from Wimbledon in 1994, and the Bronco chase had taken place while I was in London for Wimbledon. He was arrested while I was in London for Wimbledon. A whole lot of things had gone down.

When I got back from Wimbledon, I had a horrible flu on the plane. I went straight home to my house in Hollywood and went to bed. I woke up at three or four o'clock in the morning, desperately hungry, needed something to eat. I'd been gone from the house for more than three weeks. And I went down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and there was a Miss Grace's lemon cake and a honey baked ham in the refrigerator. And I sat down and cried because those two items I got every month from OJ Simpson. Wasn't as good with women. That was a different story. But if he was your buddy, you didn't have a better buddy. Media circus is one of those catchphrases that gets repeated so many times that it becomes meaningless.

But the OJ trial, which began on January 24, 1995, really was a media circus. OJ had been charged the year before with killing his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman, a waiter from a nearby restaurant. Jim Murray was the lead anchor of CNN's coverage. Well, down at the L.A. courthouse, it was known as Camp OJ. And it was called Camp OJ because it was literally, there was scaffolding and risers and trucks and crews. And it's interesting, as you walk into the courthouse, it was almost like the red carpet for the Oscars every single day. Because the attorneys and the various witnesses had to pass through all of these cameras and reporters shouting questions.

And it really was a circus, and not in the best way, but in a very real way. These days we'd call cable news stations like CNN old media, but back then, the idea of wall-to-wall coverage of a single story, of Larry King erecting a Ford operating base in LA, seemed pretty new and exciting. If you wanted the minute-to-minute latest from the case, news about whether the glove fit or the shocking Mark Furman tapes, you had to watch cable. Cable news was at its peak back then. You know, the idea of 24-hour news cycles.

There was no social media. I remember, actually, during the trial, we were asked to participate in chat sessions online through AOL. And I had to do this through the office because there was a moderator online. You know, we didn't have, there was no Facebook, there was no Instagram, there was no Twitter, there were no phones like we have today, no smartphones. So it was really the best way to get your news immediately, or in the sense of the trial, certainly, was cable news. Imagine for a second that the OJ trial took place today. You'd have Nancy Grace on headline news arguing for the prosecution, and you'd have a civil rights lawyer filing highly tweetable blog posts on behalf of the defense. But the media wasn't quite like that in 1995. Though CNN brought on plenty of OJ pundits, there was a certain non-partisanship

that characterized much of the coverage. We report, you decide. It was my belief that I was covering this case as an anchor and a reporter, and I wanted to be right down the middle. And I'm a lawyer as well, and I felt very strongly that I had to come off as unbiased. And we had legal experts on. Some would be pro-prosecution, some would be pro-defense. And it was my job to kind of guide the public through every stage of the trial. So I never gave my opinion until, gosh, you know, it might have even been 10 years later. But yes, I do believe he did it.

We now think of the O.J. trial as one of the great 90s studies of race in America, or at least L.A., while the race issue started in the media, too. Six months before the trial, Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article in The New Yorker called An Incendiary Defense. An anonymous member of O.J.'s legal team, later revealed to be Robert Shapiro, told Toobin that the defense would portray Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman's murders as the result of a racist conspiracy within the LAPD. That's the message they would sell to the jury. But first, they sold it to the public through The New Yorker. Jeffrey Toobin wrote the book on which it was based.

And Jeffrey wrote really the definitive article in The New Yorker magazine about the race card. And it was really excellent reporting by Jeffrey, but it was also exactly what the defense wanted out there, right? So it was a scoop for him, but it was also a coup for the defense because they were able to advance this theory that O.J. Simpson was framed because he's black and it's a racist LAPD cop or cops involved in planting evidence or enhancing evidence. When the trial began, cameras from CNN and Court TV were there for the duration. That too was fascinating. Judge Lance Ito had allowed cameras in the courtroom because he said it would help Americans to understand legal proceedings. Even as the trial delivered

boffo ratings, people from CNN got really squeamish. Was OJ news or were they just feeding the base instincts of the public? It wasn't too different from the soul-searching cable networks are doing now about showing Donald Trump unplugged. I recall specifically my colleagues in D.C. who were just aghast. They couldn't believe that our news network was covering this trial live every single day. And we did break away during the Oklahoma bombing. That was during the DNA portion of the trial. I mean, clearly, this was a huge, it was a terrorist attack is what it was, domestic terrorism, but it was a terrorist attack. And we went there wall to wall instead, as we should have. But, you know, what was interesting was just a couple of years later, after this trial, I talked to my friends at CNN in D.C.

And I said, it's interesting how you were blasting the fact that we were covering the OJ trial live, and now you're covering a stain on a blue dress live, right, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And we just basically traded one scandal for another, although, as I pointed out, in the case that I was covering, there were two people who were brutally murdered, And it was really a whodunit. And it was really of tremendous significance. And it wasn't as tawdry as did the president sleep with an intern. And I think in some ways, the OJ case changed our appetite for news and our expectation of what a news organization should do and uncover.

And it also gave birth to reality TV, in my opinion. For the tabloid The National Enquirer, the Simpson case didn't spark a soul-searching discussion of propriety. Newspapers and TV networks may have needed the entree of race or police corruption to allow themselves in the courtroom door. The fact that the Simpson case was a murder trial was all the Enquirer really needed to know. This kind of moral clarity gave the paper an enormous early advantage. David Perel directed the Enquirer's interest in the story. So I think the big change is we chased a story that we knew our readers wanted to know information about. A lot of other outlets kind of were deciding for the readers what they should chase and what they shouldn't, so they desperately tried to ignore it until the demand was so overwhelming

for information that they couldn't ignore it. The OJ story. story was a goldmine for the Enquirer. Its circulation rose by a half a million copies, according to the New York Times. In one stretch of 1994, the Enquirer put O.J. on its cover 16 times in 18 weeks, all but crowding out Michael Jackson and Burt Reynolds, whose rocky marriages were standbys of the 90s supermarket checkout aisle. After Simpson was arrested on June 17, 1994, the inquirer moved quickly. Perel sent reporters to download witnesses to the murders before even the lawyers got to them. A lot of people will sit in the courtroom to cover the case. We go out in the field. So as

soon as it happened and we were at the site, we had the reporters canvas the neighborhood and talk to everybody. One of the first people we talked to was Rosa Lopez, who was a maid next door. And she told us what she heard that night. And we sat down with her. We got into the house. We sat down with her for about 30, 45 minutes. And then when Johnny Cochran gave his opening arguments nearly a year later, he characterized her story in an entirely different way.

So she had already talked to his investigators after she talked to us, and suddenly her story changed. Which version of the story do I believe? I believe the story she gave us because it was hours afterward, and she had no reason to lie at that point. But we were able to do things like when the prosecution decided to have a mock trial out of town, we found out about it. We flew on the same plane with them. It was held at a motel. And we found out what happened. When they walked out, Marcia Clark walked out, we walked up to her, said, hello, we're from the Enquirer. How'd it go in there? And she was shocked and not happy because, as we later reported exclusively, they didn't get a conviction with the mock jury.

And it was the first time that people started to realize this is not a slam dunk case, as everybody had been saying it was. Unlike the LA Times, the Inquirer was willing to pay money for stories. A man who sold a knife to Simpson, one that didn't turn out to be the murder weapon, got $12,000 for telling his tale. Marsha Clark, who was the lead prosecutor of the case, came to hate what she called cash for trash reporting. If a witness took money from the inquirer, Clark felt she couldn't put that witness on the stand because their testimony would be tainted. The Inquirer did publish its share of trash, like topless photos of Clark, but it also did some ace muckraking. After O.J.'s criminal trial, but before his civil trial,

the paper found that Simpson owned Bruno Mali's shoes of the kind that had made a footprint at the crime scene. You can't top the fact that we found photos of O.J. in the shoes that left the bloody footprints at the murder scene. And what happened with that is it was just a months-long investigation where we went through every football game that he had covered and tried to look at his shoes. Bruno Mali with, I think it was a Silgasol on it. It's a unique, unique shoe, only 300 in the U.S. in his size.

And then we just happened to find the perfect shot. A photographer was trying out his new lens before the game. So he was just burning a couple of picks, caught OJ in the end zone, mid stride. The only way you can really tell what shoe it is, is by the sole of the shoe. The sole is unique. And he had his foot up so we could clearly see the sole. We took it to several experts. We didn't tell them what we thought it was. We took it to photographic experts. They all identified it as the shoe. And if you read Daniel Petruccelli's book, he credits that photo for winning the civil case. And one of the OJ criminal attorneys, when he saw the photo, privately laughed and said, I'm glad we didn't have to deal with that during the criminal trial.

This month, the website TMZ reported on a knife that had allegedly been buried at OJ's old house. Back in 1995, I asked David Perel, would that have been the inquirer's kind of scoop? No, because it's not the murder knife. Spoken like a true tabloid idealist. On the other side of the journalism spectrum, the Simpson trial was covered by mainstream reporters like Jim Newton, who led the LA Times' wide-ranging coverage of the case. Newton took his monk-like repertorial vows so seriously that he wouldn't tell me, even today, if he thought Simpson committed the murders.

Newton speaks of how much lawyers on both sides were trying to shape coverage of the case. One of the most beguiling was OJ's attorney, Johnny Cochran, whom Newton knew from Cochran's previous stint in the DA's office. I'll tell you something that I've always thought about that tells you how persuasive he was. I would say once a week during the time of the Simpson case, from the time Cochran moved into it to the acquittals, I was asking for an interview with Simpson in jail. And it tells you about how persuasive Johnny is that I actually believe that I might get it the whole time. And in retrospect,

of course, I realized that there was absolutely no chance of that happening. But, you know, he had a charisma and I liked him. After the trial, Newton flipped on cable news one day and heard that Simpson had criticized the LA Times' coverage of the case. As Simpson would later declare, Well, Newton didn't like that and decided to confront Simpson. He took his colleague Henry Weinstein and drove to Simpson's house. He sort of peeked his head out and saw that it was the two of us there and invited us in. We sat down. A major point in the trial had been the cut Simpson had on his left hand the day after the murder. Prosecutors said Simpson injured himself in

the attack. Simpson said he didn't remember how he'd gotten the cut. I had like a little nick on one hand and he pointed to it and said, do you remember how you did that? And I said, no. And he sort of, his response, I forget his exact words, was essentially, well, you can understand why I wouldn't have remembered having a cut on my hand. You know, I actually got into sort of an altercation during the interview. At one point, for some reason, he decided he didn't want me taping the interview anymore. And he reached over to take my tape recorder. And I rose up to grab it back from him. And for a minute, I thought, Jesus, he's going to hit me.

And I thought, well, at least Henry will have a good story. But he did not. He gave the tape back. and we finished the interview. But it was a strange moment in the middle of all that. There's a metaphor there. You are. I don't even know what it is. I suspect there probably is one, yeah.

You are literally struggling for control of the narrative. If you think O.J. grabbing for a tape recorder is weird, it got a lot weirder when he started giving interviews after the trial. We'll get to that, but first a word from our sponsors. All right, no matter what time of year it is, you've got to make every second count and that means looking your best. No more ready jeans or oversized hoodies. It's time to upgrade your wardrobe and let Trunk Club handle all the work for you. Trunk Club takes the hassle out of shopping by finding the best clothes for you and your style. You'll look and feel amazing and we'll always have the perfect We'll see you don't. Just like that, a trunk arrives on your doorstep filled with hand-picked clothes that are perfect for you. Try them on, keep what you like,

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That's trunkclub.com.bs for a trunk filled with clothes that you'll love wearing. Another one of our sponsors today is SimpliSafe. Here's the thing. Studies show that security systems deter burglars. It's a fact, but there is still a burglary every eight seconds in America. How? Well, think about it. Do burglars give up because some houses have security systems? No, of course not. They find a house that isn't protected. That's why you're securing your home is truly a necessity. So let me recommend this brilliant security system that my buddies at SimpliSafe built. It's ridiculously smart and its sensors

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thought Simpson was guilty. Thus, a TV interview could become a kind of climactic cross-examination with a reporter playing Perry Mason and O.J. being made to answer questions in a way he'd refused to during the trial. NBC succeeded in booking O.J. for an interview with anchors Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric, but O.J. pulled out at the last minute, saying that Brokaw and Couric were out to get him. Bill Carter, who wrote about television for the New York Times, was covering the NBC fiasco. He was at his desk at the Times when the phone rang. This was eight days after the trial. I'm sitting at my desk and I get a call and the call says, are you Bill Carter? Yes. And I said, you know, they said, so you were working on the OJ

problem with NBC. And I said, yeah, that's the story I'm doing. And the guy says, okay, you want an exclusive? And I said, well, yeah, I guess. And he says, hold on a second. So a few seconds later, this voice comes on and says, hey, man, how you doing? Are you covering the receiver and mouthing to your coworkers across the newsroom, it's OJ, it's OJ? Well, actually, I didn't have to do that,

because after the first few sentences of the interview, my colleague, Lori Mifflin, who was covering TV with me at the time, who sat opposite me, facing me, and in between us was like a bookshelf. And I saw her head come up over the top of the bookshelf. And she looks at me with these huge eyes, and she mouths, Is that O.J.? She doesn't say it. She mouths it.

And I nod my head like this, and she bolts. And she winds up getting the national editor, and the national editor of the New York Times at that point in history was Dean Becke, who is now the executive editor of the New York Times. So Dean comes over, and he passes me a note, Are you talking to O.J.? And I'm nodding. And, you know, I wasn't prepared to do a real formal interview, so I didn't have a recorder going. I'm just scribbling notes.

I'm literally taking notes longhand on a pad while he's talking to me. And I'm trying to keep him going because I'm thinking, Well, he probably wants to just talk about NBC and get out. But, you know, I got him on the phone. I'm going to ask him some questions about the trial. I asked him several specific things. I asked him specifically what he thought of Marsha Clark, for example, when he was sitting there during the whole trial. And he said something pretty provocative, and many of the things he said sounded really like he didn't think through how it would come out in the paper. But he said something along the lines of,

you know, I'd like to get her in a dark alley and knock her block off. And I was like, whoa, that probably is not a smart thing to say. And one of the most provocative things, which did not get into the piece because it was sort of personal, I asked him, you know, many of the police tapes, the 911 tapes,

came out in the trial of Nicole calling the cops when you were attacking her or breaking into the house. And, you know, you didn't get a chance to respond to that in the trial. I mean, but, you know, a lot of people concluded from that, that you were a violent guy and an abusive guy. And he says, Bill, Bill, Bill, wait, wait, wait, Bill.

And I said, yeah. And he says, Bill, you know, you're a married guy, right? And I said, well, yeah. And he said, so like, you know, you know what it guy, right? And I said, well, yeah. And he said, so, like, you know, you know what it is. You know what it's like with a wife sometimes. I was like, oh, man, no, I don't. So the funny thing is I finished the interview, I guess, you know, it was like half an hour, as I said.

And then I have to go talk to the editor. What are we going to do? We're going to write, you know, a thousand words for the first edition. At that point, we had an edition that came out at nine o'clock. So it was really close to the first deadline. Just get it, you know, a thousand words. We'll get that out. And then for the next edition, we'll write a much longer story. And I said, okay. And I walked back to my desk and I walked, my desk had a, you know, days we had phones with message lights on them. And my message light was on, and I'd pick it up, and it's O.J. Hey, I forgot something, man.

Call me back. Call me on this number. So I called him back. I swear I don't remember exactly what that was, but there was some small thing he wanted to go back. Oh, he said something about Cour reasons he decided not to do the interview with them was he got word that they were sharpening their knives to come after him. And I'm thinking, sharpening knives, man, this is the wrong metaphor for you. Not a good one in this circumstance. So why did O.J. call Bill Carter?

Well, years earlier, Carter had interviewed O.J. for a book about Monday Night Football. But there was a strategic reason, too. Carter wasn't one of the reporters covering the case on a daily basis. Whereas sports TV producers had once controlled OJ, putting his smile to their use, OJ's bizarre and notorious celebrity now gave him the privilege of controlling the media. He was right in a way because, as I said, I didn't follow the trial. For years, OJ continued to tantalize the media with the idea he had something to get off his chest. He cold-called a few more reporters, and in 1996, he recorded an interview himself and sold VHS tapes via the phone number 1-800-OJ-TELLS.

By 1998, after O.J. had been found responsible for the murders in a civil trial, he was beginning to feel his oats. He told Esquire magazine, Let's say I committed this crime. Even if I did do this, it would have to have been because I loved her very much, right? The line seemed to tiptoe right up to the edge of self-incrimination. That same year, OJ finally agreed to a TV interview. Not with the network news anchor, but in his old cozy home of sports television, the corner of the media that built his image back in the 1980s. OJ agreed to talk to Chris Myers,

who was hosting a half-hour ESPN interview show called Up Close. He agreed to do it, but it had to be live. And he told us that he had Barbara Walters wanted to do the first interview after the wrongful death suit and the acquittal and the double murder trial, but she was going to tape the interview. And he didn't want to tape it because he said, I know the case better than anybody, and I don't want somebody editing my answer. So if we do it live, I'll do it. And I said, well, I have to ask whatever I want. That was O.J. in 1998. For as badly as he thought he'd been treated during the trial, he still believed in the power of the old OJ, America's Nordberg, to get on TV and charm his way back into our hearts. Chris Myers,

of course, didn't really care about charm. He knew how big an opportunity this was and set out to talk to prosecutors so he could ask just the right questions. I talked to Vincent Bugliosi, who was the prosecutor who put Charles Manson away, who lived out here, and I just – just so that he tried to help me with what goes on in a courtroom and how somebody on the stand makes the attorney look bad. He was very helpful in that regard. I mean it was to the point where I was at home and my wife would say pass the salt and I'd say I object. It was that kind of – I felt like I was preparing for a courtroom show or movie, not to make light of it. But it really took that kind of focus because here it was. It was interesting. The next day I was talking to like Dikembe Mutombo, you know, about a rebound.

You know, I mean, that's kind of how it was at that time. So, yeah, it was a very fascinating experience. The interview was contentious from the start. Myers thought it'd be fruitless to ask OJ, so did you do it? So he asked him something different. He asked O.J. if he was capable of killing. The answer I don't recall off the top of my head, but it was the one that many people talked about because the answer ultimately was yes, and I think he made it sound, tried to water it down a little.

Well, we're all capable. Again, the rationalization, he did a lot of that Rationalizing behavior that normally you wouldn't do. But yeah, we're all capable of killing if you get pushed to the right moment. Well, I didn't ask if you're in the military or you have to save someone's life. This is more, he knows what we're talking about. The interview went on from there. Myers would move in and ask a question. O.J. would filibuster and weave conspiracy theories.

He talked at one point about how other friends of Ron Goldman had been murdered, implying that quote-unquote real killers had come from that world. Myers and Simpson sparred for 18 minutes without a commercial, an eternity in television. When the first ad began, a woman handling PR for OJ ran out and tried to intervene. OJ waved her off. He was confident that he was doing fine. He also said something else during the commercial. He turns to me and says something to the effect, from what I recall, of, you know, hey, I got a tee time out at Riviera. We got an opening for a foursome. Do you want to play next week? Got in with that.

I was stunned. The interview didn't have a Frost-Nixon moment of self-incrimination. It was more a study in facial expressions. O.J. was smiling as he went to commercial, as if he'd just scored a touchdown or shaved a stroke off his handicap. Occasionally, he would turn away from Myers and look directly into the camera, as if he was trying to bypass the media altogether and make his case directly to the public. Myers and Simpson went at it for a half hour. Then Myers got word in his ear from

a producer, keep going, keep going, we're holding SportsCenter. At the time we got the call, we're out in Southern California here in their home office in Bristol, Connecticut. Our producer in the control room gets the call. And I believe it was right around the 25, 30 minute break. Because you want to, when you plan out an interview, you never know where it's going. And the most important thing is listening to the answers. But you had, at least in my mind, I'm thinking, hey, in the 30 minutes, which really isn't 30 because you do have some breaks in there, I got to cover certain things that were really missing this. And part of O.J.'s strategy, I thought, was that he would ramble on answers and go into directions he wanted to keep you from getting back to the meat of, okay, you're searching for the killers. Show me something.

Did you write a check? Did you call a detective agency? Something. So in that case, we had so much material, really, we could have gone on and on a couple of hours, but we got the call. And I heard in my ear in a break from the producer, hey, they're giving us extra time, we're going to go, this is really, you know, this is going well, and it's important, and we have a lot to cover. So I thought it was the right call somebody above me made to go with it. And I was happy,

I had plenty more notes. I may have thrown off my order or flow a little bit, but O.J. Simpson was doing that anyway. So I thought it was the right call. I think we ended up going 50 minutes or so. It was 50 minutes of live TV with O.J. Simpson. The second half of it conducted with the words, SportsCenter is coming up at the bottom of the screen. We had covered a lot of the things that we wanted to, and I just said, appreciate your time. And it's the only guest after four or five years of doing up close with a lot of famous people in sports, and I never shook his hand. I always do. That's my nature.

And in this one, I just felt like I couldn't. Maybe that was a way of signaling to people where I stood on the issue. Everybody seemed to have an opinion. But I was polite and respectful, as he was, through the course of the interview. But then you could hear him as we were pulling away on the wide shot and the mics were still open again, very savvy with his TV knowledge of, well, it was great talking sports with you. Those were his final sarcastic words. It was great talking

sports with you. It's as if OJ had expected Myers to do 10 minutes on the murders and then ask him if this was the year the Buffalo Bills would finally get off the schneid. The response to the Myers interview, as to nearly every other occasion in which O.J. appeared in the media, was neatly divided. Two things I remember about that. One, Bart Starr, who I have great respect for, the Hall of Fame quarterback from the Packers, who was going to come on the show, and when he heard we were going to have O.J. Simpson on, he made it clear, I didn't talk to him directly.

I tried to speak with him directly. But he made it clear to us that while I appreciate the show and enjoy what Chris does, I can't go, I won't go on a show that puts somebody like O.J. Simpson on. That was one side of it. The other side of it was Allen Iverson, who was going to be on and threw people, again, didn't talk to him, but was angry that he thought I was unfair. This was after the interview, that I was unfair to O.J. and made him look more guilty, so he didn't want to come on the program and be interviewed by me.

Eighteen years after Chris Myers' interview, the media's O.J. obsession has entered a kind of lucrative reboot period. The FX series is pulling down record ratings, according to Variety. Prosecutor Marsha Clark did a media tour and was rebranded as a feminist icon by the website The Cut. ABC reports that sales of Jeffrey Toobin's OJ book, The Run of His Life, are up 900 percent. Toobin, now entrenched as a CNN legal analyst, was all over TV too. And with a scoop about the possible murder knife, TMZ founder Harvey Levin did a victory lap. Levin, by the way, had reported on OJ back in the 90s as a local TV reporter in LA, once announcing another dramatic scoop and then

retracting it on air a few days later. In 2016, no one remembered that, and the cable bookers and web aggregators regarded Levin's return as a godsend. Maybe the media's first seemingly naive idea about OJ Simpson turned out to be the best. In the end, OJ really was our best pal. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Our leader, Bill Simmons, will be back in this spot Thursday with more great podcast content. But before we go, I want to tell you again about today's sponsor, Trunk Club.

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